Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
"A hilarious, richly imagined bear's eye view of love, music, alienation, manhood and humanity…that recalls Pynchon at his most controlled." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)The hero of this sensational debut novel is an alto-sax virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Coltrane and Rollins. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Blake- and Shakespeare-quoting bear whose musical, spiritual, and romantic adventures add up to perhaps the best novel, ursine or human, ever written about jazz.